Immersion in Middle-Earth

I set myself an ambitious goal.  I was all up in arms about immersion once again and, having had that blinding flash of the obvious association between immersion and enjoyment of certain titles, figures I could explore some past titles to see if that could pinpoint what makes for an immersive experience for me.

The danger here is that what is immersive can easily be confused with things I just like… and thus things that prevent or break immersion must be things I simply don’t like… and so the whole thing might just devolve into things I have praised or groused about in the past.

And “confused” probably draws too dark of a line between likes and immersion.  They are at a minimum fellow travelers.  But I know I can find cases where things I do not always enjoy and up in the mix of immersion as well.  The rather nebulous concept of “grind” fits in there.  Grinding mobs for a quest or just for xp can be bad… except when it is not.  Sometimes it is just what you need, and easy repetitive task that lets you fall into the rhythm of the game and your character.

Anyway, with all that and more in mind I thought I might take a stab at what I consider up front to be an easier title with which to pin down my immersion factors.

And the winner is Lord of the Rings Online.

Straight out of the gate the lore of the game is something I had been immersed in for nearly 30 years before it launched.  I was Book of Lost Tales and other bits and pieces published by Christopher Tolkien deep into it.  I used to knock out The Hobbit on a Sunday afternoon if I had nothing else going on and would re-read the main trilogy every two or three years.

So I was already sold on the idea… though that can be a hazard if the company doesn’t deliver.  But Turbine did deliver.  LOTRO might not be the most unique or well built MMORPG, but it looked and felt like Third Age Middle-earth to me.  The landscape, the buildings, even the stars at night are all amazing.

As well, the integration of the player into the story was done very well.  That was something I was worried about before playing the game.  One of my early posts on the blog, less than two weeks after I started, was a bit of fretting about how Turbine would handle LOTRO and lore.

But parallel path of the player through the tale, where you are handling important side tasks and occasionally crossing paths with the fellowship, is done with such care that it has never caused me much concern.

Knowing the lore and being predisposed to go along with it helped me get in the zone with the game.  There were certainly problems, especially early on.  The usual problems of running back and forth too much or perhaps spending too much time on the bear/boar/wolf circuit were pain points.  And the UI itself, with odd and sometimes indecipherable icons for skills and attacks… again, I have a post about some of that… were among my gripes.  But at least you got a lot of bag space up front, so inventory management wasn’t an immediate struggle.

Even the kind of goofy take on crafting, where you pick a vocation that gets you a basket of three trade skills plus the related harvesting was at least a slightly different take on things, though it could become something of an unpleasant grind on its own after not too long into the game.

So I found fun and interest and immersion to some degree on our first pass through, and immersion seemed to grown as I returned to LOTRO various times over the years.  I have mentioned before that having knowledge of the game when you come back to start from scratch helps things along and makes me feel more the champion of the free peoples.

To this end there are a string of zones that I enjoy running through again and again.  The starter zones not so much… I’m not really a fan of the Shire, quaint though it be… but once I am headed towards Bree I am very much engaged in the game and the story and the tale of my character.  Bree and the Old Forest and Midgewater Marshes and the Lone Lands and Evendim are my happy path, where I fall under the spell of the game, where I can feel myself get lost in the experience.

Things taper off a bit for me in the Trollshaws and in the Misty Mountains, and I have never been much on either Forochel or Angmar, the former being weighed down by so much running back and forth while the latter is just a bit too grim for my tastes.  But I still can carry on and find the zone through those and on into Moria.

And then somewhere, between Moria and Mirkwood my immersion fades and the game feels like a labor, the story doesn’t capture me and all the quests become like a weight dragging me down.

Mirkwood might explain it.  It is a dark and uninspired area into which you get thrown.  I’ve been through Moria well enough a few times now, but Mirkwood is truly an impenetrable forest in my way.

So I roll up any number of characters and get to level 40 and be quite pleased.  I can push on and still enjoy myself.  But there is a limit beyond which there is no joy, no immersion, just grind.

It is tempting to blame Siege of Mirkwood, it being a blameworthy expansion, but even Mines of Moria, the epic underground adventure, begins to wear on me.  There is a temptation in my to revert to my “no good expansions” stance.  It is handy to reach for the idea that the initial crafted experience, the base world of any MMORPG, is a solid experience and only besmirched by trying to tack on a sequel.

I’ve played that tune any number of times, and it does have a ring of truth to it at times, especially with titles like Rift.  Changes in philosophy, new features piled on the game, attempts to be both true to the game and yet provide a new experience… to both player and developer, the latter who may chafe even more that the former at having to do the same old thing over and over again… must necessarily dilute from the original focus.

Expect, of course, I can find exceptions to the rule.  For every Storm Legion departure from the core tenets of a title there is a Ruins of Kunark that is a much needed seasoning that enhances an already delicious meal.

But as much as I might like to blame Mirkwood and the darkness of Moria, I’ve boosted some characters past those locations.  I have tried my shot at Rohan a couple of times as well and failed, and I am told that Riders of Rohan was not a bad experience.

And here is where I risk sounding as though I am simply going to blame the failure of immersion on a feature I have complained about in the past.  Yes, I am going to lay this on legendary items.

I know, I know, the elevator speech for legendary items is pretty awesome.  I know I went in as a true believer when it came time.  You pick up a weapon that will grow with you, the potential of which you will unlock as you adventure with it.

That is truly the stuff of legends.  Arthur and Excalibur.  Aragorn and Anduril.  Even Bilbo and Sting are pairings many of us wished to emulate in our D&D campaigns or online adventures.  Strider doesn’t hand off his family sword to the nearest shop keeper the moment he finds something a bit shinier or with a slightly better stat.  No, he and the weapon are one and they fight together.

Unfortunately, Turbine screwed that idea up pretty badly and then proceeded to double down on it repeatedly… since late 2008.  Seriously, that is when Mines of Moria launched and as a feature it has just gotten worse and worse.

Let’s start with the basic problem, the immersion killed for me, which is that your legendary item is a needy baby constantly crying for attention.  At times it feels like you can’t get through half a dozen mobs before an alert pops up that it has leveled up and you have new points to apply.   And then there is the need to go back to camp to reforge it, which doesn’t happen as often, but still comes about way more frequently than it ought to.

And then, add on top of the constant nag that is your legendary, you then end up abandoning it down the road for the inevitable upgrade from a new expansion or update.  We are Aragorn abandoning Anduril every ten levels rather than every other level.

I used to think that maybe the whole thing was just a bad idea, that we shouldn’t level up weapons, that it is a flawed mechanic that should be avoided.  Then Blizzard did the legendary weapon thing with the Legion expansion and it was freaking brilliant.  And they even had a bunch of the same things I hated with LOTRO legendaries, like having to go back to town to upgrade it, but somehow made it work.  It was great.  Legion might be the last great WoW expansion.

And Blizzard had the good sense to not try to drag that on into the next expansion.  I mean, I was sad to leave Ashbringer behind and I missed the skills it enabled and the looks you could unlock with it, but it was probably for the best. (I’d seriously consider a WoW Legion Classic server I guess, just to do that again.)

So there it is.  Legendary items.

I mean sure, there are other things.  The monetization can pull me out of the game.  Having a “buy your way through this with some mithril coins!” mechanic does not jibe well with immersion.  But the mithril coin thing doesn’t show up constantly when I am out in the field questing.

I can get through escorting Sara Oakheart and running up and down the lengths of Forochel and people with crappy non-RP names and avoid a good chunk of the monetization by playing on the Legedary servers.  But even when I boosted past Mirkwood into Rohan the first thing in my face was the freaking legendary weapon and the need to do whatever.

There are literally a lot of things that people complain about when it comes to LOTRO that I can overlook like the stiff character models, the indecipherable iconography, the skirmishes, the dull housing, and how grindy crafting becomes as you move forward in levels.  But legendary items… that just kills it for me.

And I am not the only one complaining about them.  I remained amazed that first Turbine and then SSG not only kept rolling on with a system like that for more than a dozen years, but have only now conceded that maybe they ought to look into giving it a rework.

Anyway, after that reconnaissance by text of LOTRO, what are the take aways?  What makes for good immersion and what fails me on that front?

Immersion pluses

• Familiar lore
• Good adaptation of the lore to the game
• Feeling of place within the game
• Mechanics are familiar but not identical to other fantasy MMORPGs
• Familiarity with the game
• Well done landscape that feels like Middle-earth

Immersion minuses

• Legendary items (primary)
• Monetization (somewhat avoidable)
• Poor content mid-game (Mirkwood)
• Poor iconography
• Lack of large monitor support (my 34″ monitor specifically)

In the end, LOTRO remains a game I have been happy enough to go back and play multiple times… at least the original content.  It is a game where I have often found immersion, traveling through the game, both as confidently as a ranger and as lost as a neophyte, depending on where I am.  (I don’t get lot in the Old Forest anymore.)

So this post was a bit of a gimme.  I already had strong feelings about what draws me to the game and what has pushed me away.  With this post I have set something of a baseline.  The question is, where do I go next?  Do I pick another fantasy title and compare immersion points, or do I try another direction and see if a very different game shares points of intersection?

LOTRO Outages and Compensation

While I haven’t been playing the game for a while now, I have been reading lately that the game has been having problems.

Starting around July 15the the servers were sometimes down, often for long stretches during prime play hours.  When the servers were up, chat functions were limited and reliability and connectivity wasn’t stable.  The company, Standing Stone Games… or Daybreak, depending on who you think owns them… has been reluctant to offer anything much beyond “we’re working on it” sort of answers.

It seems that something happened in their data center.  They at least confirmed that much.  It stands as another reminder that software isn’t a “solved” problem but a constantly shifting scenario where updates are pretty much regularly required for security, compatibility, and support reasons.  And updates often make new problems as they fix old ones.

This certainly wasn’t the longest outage in MMORPG history.  CCP has had their issues now and again with EVE Online.  And then there was SOE, which had its great hacking issue back in 2011 when all of their games were completely offline for almost two weeks and the PlayStation Network was down for more than three.  It was a bad time for them.  And other MMOs have broken and never recovered.  I seem to recall that being the fate for the now aptly named Fallen Earth.

But the problems seem to have been somewhat addressed over the weekend.  Chat channels are still limited, but the servers were up.  I don’t know how well they were doing, but I didn’t see any further “everything is down” reports.

So now comes the time when they work out some way to give the players some compensation.

This can be kind of a big deal.  Sony and SOE faced a class action lawsuit over their outage even after their “make good” plan.  Granted, there was more in play than just the outage, but it ended up costing Sony quite a bit, even if the players affected pretty much got squat. (In class action suits, the lawyers are generally the only winners.)

The LOTRO offer, posted in the forums, is available between now and August 31s by using the code THANKYOUGIFT in the LOTRO Store.  The code can be used once per account, so choose wisely where you redeem it.  That will get you the following.

• Skill and Slayer Deed Boost x5
• Enhanced XP Supply x5
• +5000 Enhanced Reputation Supply
• +2000 Virtue Acceleration Tome

All players can use the code, but there is still some pending compensation planned for VIP players, which means subscribers.  The information is supposed to appear in the thread linked above.

If you want the play by play coverage of the outages, Massively OP’s post about the compensation has links to the story so far.

The Ahn’Qiraj War Effort set to Begin in WoW Classic

The day has arrived for the Ahn’Qiraj opening events to begin in WoW Classic.

Here come the bugs!

In order to unlock the 20 player Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj raid and the 40 player Temple of Ahn’Qiraj raid, Horde and Alliance players have to collect supplies in Orgrimmar and Ironforge to support the coming war.

Upon collecting enough supplies, a 10 hour long war event will be unlocked.  That will bring Anubisath and Qiraji warriors to Barrens and Thousand Needles, for low level players, and Silithus, Tanaris, and Feralas for higher levels.  Fighting there will gain you gold, loot, and faction with the Brood of Nozdormu.

There is also a quest line to run down that rewards a mount, so long as you finish it before the gates unlock, and a competition to become the person on your server declared the Scarab Lord.

And all of that begins today once the servers are up.  Blizzard has a post up describing the event in more detail.  And, it seems that at least one server has all the supplies they need stored up in advance, so it will be a very short event there indeed.

I also got a reminder that Holly Longdale is on the WoW Classic team on Twitter this morning.

The quests leading to opening the gates of Ahn'Qiraj in WoW Classic unlock this week! They will lead to a one-time event soon. Epic to relive! Reminds me of the Sleeper in EQ. :P

— Holly Longdale (@TheWindstalker) July 28, 2020

Let’s hope it isn’t too much like the Sleeper event and the server doesn’t go down.

Meanwhile, Blizzard thinks it has a handle on the lag issues that the event may cause, but we shall see.

EVE Online Command Ships Get a Small Update

CCP announced today that they had deployed the Combat Command update, part of the Zenith Quadrant plan, to give a bit of a buff to command ships.

Command ship love

The changes, listed out in an update to the patch notes, are as follows:

Attack Command Ships (Absolution, Astarte, Nighthawk, Sleipnir):

• 3% bonus to command burst strength changed to 4% bonus to command burst strength
• 100% bonus to command burst range removed

Absolution:

• Mass decreased from 13,300,000 to 12,300,000
• Max velocity increased from 150 to 158
• CPU increased from 400 to 420
• PG from increased 1500 to 1550
• Scan resolution increased from 210 to 252

Astarte:

• Max velocity increased from 155 to 165
• CPU increased from 440 to 450
• Scan resolution increased from 200 to 240

Claymore:

• 5% bonus to missile explosion velocity increased to 10% bonus to missile velocity
• 7.5% bonus to shield boost amount changed to 4% per level bonus to shield resistances
• max targeting range increased from 65km to 75km
• Scan resolution increased from 220 to 264

Damnation:

• Scan resolution increased from 210 to 252

Eos:

• Command Ships bonuses (per skill level):
  • 7.5% bonus to Drone Tracking speed
  • 10% bonus to Drone Optimal range
  • 3% bonus to Armored Command and Skirmish Command burst strength and duration
• Gallente Battlecruiser bonuses (per skill level):
  • 10% bonus to Drone hitpoints and damage
  • 4% bonus to Armor resistances

• Max targeting range increased from 65km to 75km
• Max velocity increased from 145 to 150
• Mass decreased from 13,000,000 to 12,500,000
• Drone bay increased from 250m3 to 300m3
• High slots decreased from 6 to 5
• Low slots increased from 6 to 7
• Scan resolution increased from 200 to 240

Nighthawk:

• 7.5% bonus to missile rate of fire increased to 10% bonus to missile rate of fire
• max velocity increased from 140 to 150
• mass decreased from 14,810,000 to 13,200,000
• mid slots increased from 5 to 6
• low slots decreased from 5 to 4
• Scan resolution increased from 195 to 234

Sleipnir:

• Scan resolution increased from 220 to 264

Vulture:

• Command ship skill bonus to hybrid optimal range changed to 10% shield hp per level
• Scan resolution increased from 195 to 234

After a few bad experiences I stay away from boosting and command ships, so can’t really say if these changes will make much of a difference.  The Eos looks like it got the most changes.  We will see if the state of the Nighthawk gets any better.  The next time I see one in space will likely be the first time.

The update also marked the end of the 2v2 cruiser brawl proving ground event.  A destroyer event will be starting on Friday.

Hilmar and the Chaos Era of EVE Online

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

-Alfred Pennyworth, The Dark Knight

Talking in Stations released a show on Friday focused on the null sec blackout featuring CCP Hilmar Veigar Petursson, along with EVE Community Manager CCP Falcon and EVE Online Brand Manager CCP Goodfella, and it is a show people will be talking about for quite a while.

Local is now delayed in null sec

It is also a bit of a frustrating show to which to listen as the TiS staff basically failed to challenge their guests on anything in even the most mild fashion.  The tone is set in the first few minutes when, after Matterall asks about the effect of the blackout of local in null sec, Hilmar says that activity is up in the game, saying that the MAU and DAU numbers for July are at their highest point in the last five years.

Here is where, in the back of my head, I am yelling, “Ask if that is because of the Season of Skills event, which required people to login daily to get free skill points!”  What we got instead was Carnaeros basically holding Hilmar’s coat, nicely explaining that those terms meant “Monthly Active Users” and “Daily Active Users” and then letting Hilmar carry on as though the blackout was all that went on in July.

I get that this is sort of the style of TiS.  Matterall is a nice guy and likes to create a space where everybody on the show gets their turn to speak without being interrupted.  (Imagine the same interview on the Open Comms Show, where Dirk and Rahne would be shouting over each other to try to respond.)  This is, perhaps, how you get guests like Hilmar, by having a reputation of encouraging your guests to speak by giving them easy questions and letting them go their own way.  But given what was said by Hilmar and Falcon, it made for an unsatisfying listening experience as my brain kept coming up with follow up questions to expand or clarify or nail down what was really being said.

And a lot was said on the show, which I am sure people will be digesting and examining and writing or speaking about for weeks to come.   I have things I want to pick apart from the show and, as I noted on Twitter, I could make a months worth of “Quote of the Day” posts out of it.  This could be a watershed moment for the game, the announcement of some drastic changes coming to EVE Online.

Or it might have been the online equivalent of a late night drunken dorm room discussion in college, a metaphorical circle jerk of “wouldn’t it be great…” sort of ideas.

So my first question out of the gate is how seriously should we take this interview?

I don’t even know who CCP Goodfella is, and that he is the brand manager makes it likely we can discount pretty much any ideas he espouses… not that I can recall anything he said.  Sorry man.

CCP Falcon is the Community Manager, which puts him in the thick of things with the players. But, by his own admission, he is not part of the design and development loop.  I had a post with a quote from him on Friday around a reply he put on Reddit about what he would do about capital ships.  He made it clear down the way that he has his own opinions about the game, which he can freely express, but which are not necessarily the official line of CCP.

So when Falcon is on about his dystopian hellscape vision of EVE Online, he often prefaces it with “If it were up to me,” a solid indication that it is not.  The problem is that this tends to blur the line between when he is speaking for the company and when he is speaking for himself, as most people will only remember what he said and not how he prefaced it.  Is it his opinion or CCP’s that people who don’t like risk when they mine should go back to high sec?

And then there is Hilmar.  He was involved in the development of the game, wrote code and was part of the design team and has been CEO at CCP since 2004.  While Pearl Abyss now owns CCP, he is still the boss on the ground in Iceland, so when he says something it gets some weight.

But how much weight does it get… or should it even get?

He had been absent from the game for quite a stretch, making a big deal about returning and trying out Planetary Interaction and finding the UI for it abysmal.  The CEO complains, a dev blog appears, and changes go in.

He has said that he had been playing in wormhole space lately and now we have the local chat blackout in null sec.  This is a change that has been talked about for years, but the CEO goes and plays in WH space and suddenly it happens.

Now he says he is playing faction warfare, so I guess that is good news for somebody I hope.  Maybe FW will get some love… or maybe some FW mechanic will get stuffed into null sec.

Of course, he was also the voice of CCP during the Incarna fiasco where he manifested some J. Allen Brack level arrogance in telling the players that the company knew better what they wanted when it came to the cash shop while dismissing people who wanted the hangar view of their ship back rather than the resource hungry captain’s quarter or the metaphorically disastrous locked door, continuing to denigrate it as “ship spinning” even as they said they would return the feature in some form.

After that Hilmar declared that the era of the Jesus Feature was over and CCP started updating and iterating on features they had launched then neglected.

I am also a bit skeptical of Hilmar’s relationship with how things have worked out in the past.  One of his big talking points during the show was making the game easier for new players but harder for veterans.  Malcanis says that anything you do for new players tends to benefit vets even more so, while we have clearly seen that making things difficult for veterans tends to just lock them into their position, with the changes essentially turning into barriers that keep newer players out.

If he is talking about a better NPE… a topic about which I have another post brewing… that is one thing.  But beyond that how do you help new players?  And does the planned Chaos Era help the new player retention issue that CCP went on about at EVE North?

So, does Hilmar saying something mean it is going to happen?  Not that what he is saying is good or bad, but is he the final word?  Does this represent consensus in the development team or just voicing his own opinions?  Is the Chaos Era about to begin in New Eden?  Will there be a dev blog?  Hilmar said that there are a lot of destabilizing things that will show up in the coming weeks.  So maybe it is already a done deal?

I don’t know.  We’ll probably have to wait and see and evaluate what we get.

Related material:

• Talking in Stations interview
• Reddit Thread with Select Quotes transcribed by Suitonia
• Evehermit – Mindset

 

Keepstar Down in Kinakka

In something of a replay of the Keepstar kill in Aeschee I wrote about yesterday, the Imperium and various locals formed up again earlier today to kill another Keepstar in low sec space.

This time around the Keepstar in question belonged to Waffles, the former low sec arm of Pandemic Legion.  While SniggeWaffe, the main corp that made up Waffles, was folded into Pandemic Legion late last year, Waffles still exists and holds some assets, including the late Keepstar in Kinakka.

Closing soon…

As with the Shadow Cartel Keepstar, there was a big form up for the kill, with at least seven fleets headed out to low sec, leaving time dilation effects in their wake as they traveled.

Even before we left it sounded like there would be no defenders.  As we metered fleets into the system, the titans landed and started firing, stopping the repair timer and beginning to eat away at the structure.

Titans framed between the uprights firing

I was in Kendarr’s fleet in the logi wing again.  It was the fourth subcap fleet to be pinged out, as the first three filled up before I had even logged in.  I didn’t get to spend a lot of time watching the Keepstar however as we went off to go camp the gate to the high sec system Onnamon.  That kept the faster locking combat ships in our fleet busy, knocking out about 40 kills.

We did get warped on to the Keepstar grid for a chance to get on the kill mail.

More fleets on grid

Unfortunately Kendarr would only warp us in at 100km off the Keepstar for our tag.  While I brought along a sentry drone so I would be able to drop it and take a long shot at the Keepstar, I needed to be inside of 60km to make that happen.  So I missed out on another Keepstar kill mail.  But nearly 2,000 other people made it on.  While somebody was gunning the Keepstar, no fleets came to support it.  Still, Kinakka topped the low sec charts for kills.

Kills happening in Kinakka

And so another structure on the periphery of the fight was destroyed.  The main front in Fade continues to be a grapple over i-hubs.  To get at Circle of Two we need to take those down to remove the cyno jammers so we can go after their Keepstar again.  That will be a while coming.

A Minor Venture Adventure

I had the desire to do something in New Eden.  Unfortunately, that desire hit as my main and my alt sat in laden ships in a citadel half way through a trip home from a deployment.  I could have jump cloned one or both of them out, but I wanted to make sure I was there and ready to go.

Time to get out another character.  But which one?

Theoretically I have a dozen characters in EVE Online spread over four accounts.  In reality, most of them do not add up to much.  Some of them were created to grab an amusing name, like Claude Ring or Escher Alias.   Others I had plans for, but never really went anywhere, the general issue being that you can only train skills on a single character on an account at a time.  So, for example, neither of the other two characters on the same account as my main ever get any training time because I have never been done training everything in Wilhelm’s queue.

Just never going to happen.

However, I have an account sitting around with a couple of Alpha clone characters.  I tried following in CCP Rise’s steps at one point, but with all of the Alpha skills trained on him I was free to roll up another Alpha on the account and start him training.  Having a Gallente Alpha, I went for Amarr.

I have kept him training sporadically.  With the one day long queue, I put a few skills in and then forget about him for a few days… or a week… or a month… then go back and start him up again.  Last time around he had just finished up some mining related skills.  Also, he had collected a Venture mining frigate as part of some give away from CCP… was that from Christmas?  Anyway, I logged in and saw him sitting there in the Venture and decided to go mining.

The Agency doesn’t support mining missions…

I had run my Amarrian friend through the new player experience and looted along the way, so he had a couple of extra civilian mining lasers sitting in his hangar.  So I fitted those, grabbed a couple of Warrior I drones for defense, and undocked to go try this ship out.

The Venture came into New Eden long after my career in mining was over.  Back when I was at the low end of mining your first goal ship was an Osprey and you mined asteroids that looked vaguely like potatoes.

Space was different back in 2007

And you had to train up to get into that Osprey.  The Venture though, a new player gets the skills to fly that on day one.  It is small and handy and has an ore bay, something that also wasn’t a thing back when I mined as a profession.  And, if you follow the industry career tutorial, you end up getting one for free.

So I took it out to a system near Amarr, headed to a belt, and mined some Veldspar for a while.

Soon to be a post at EVE Online Pictures…

I also had the Yoiul Festival Skin for the ship, so ran with that as well.

A handy enough little ship, though the civilian mining lasers were slow.  Once the ore bay was nearly full I took off back to Amarr to look for some upgraded mining lasers.  I sold my Veldspar straight to a buy order and found some better lasers.  I thought about a mining upgrade as well, but had already set off again, so put that on my list for later.

I picked up another load of Veldspar and headed back to Amarr to sell that.  There I decided to see if that was the best plan.  The buy orders for raw Veldspar seemed okay.

Veldspar in the raw

But the rule back in the day was to never to sell ore.  The guides always said you should refine your ore and sell the minerals.  That was the way to greater profit.

However, things have changed.  I refined the ore only to find that the remaining Tritanium were worth less than I would have gotten for the ore.

Lesson learned

And that does not count the 20K ISK it cost me to refine the ore.  Better to sell the raws as a newbie these days I guess.

I took that ISK and bought a Mining Laser Upgrade I module in order to speed things up.

The third time out I dropped into a belt and started mining only to see some hostile NPCs in the belt with me.  I launched my drones and sent them after the closest of the cruiser-sized rats only to find that they were not the usual specimen of belt rat.  My Venture exploded before I could warp off.

Autothysian Lancers are bad news

Well that was bad news… not to mention yet another something I never had to deal with back in the day.  Now my Venture was gone and I was sitting in my pod.

However, things were not hopeless.  First, getting a ship destroyed is one of those new player achievements that earn you some ISK.  The payout was 200,000 ISK for losing a ship worth 160,000 ISK.  And then there was the default insurance payout.

The payout

That was worth another 106,000 ISK, which made the destruction of my Venture a profitable turn of events.  Plus I had already made a couple of Ventures worth of ISK from the first two runs.  I was able to buy a new ship in Amarr and head back out again.

Shiny new replacement Venture

I wanted to get a closer look… and maybe a few screen shots… at the NPCs who blapped me, but they had moved along by the time I had returned.  My wreck, however, was waiting for me, with all the modules still there.

Back to the scene of the crime…

If I had not been in such a hurry to refit I could have saved myself a little bit of ISK.  The modules were very cheap relative to the ship and the ISK already earned.  So it was back to orbiting and mining.

Back to the clutter of the belt

There remains a zen-like peacefulness to mining.  It is something easy to do while you listen to a podcast or an audio book or chat with people on coms.  That is especially true early ones mining career, when it takes a while to burn down a rock.  Later on, when you’re running strip miners and tech II crystals and it just takes a cycle and a half to finish off an asteroid and you’re juggling a couple of rocks and watching the scanner to see how much each has left so you can cut the cycle early and move on without wasting time… well… life does become more hectic.

So it was nice to go through the peaceful bit, if only to remember what it was like.  And it was also nice to see that even mining the most common element in New Eden was still a decent way to build up some capital to buy ships, replace old ones, purchase new skills, and all of the other foundation work that sends you off in the various ways of the game.

Not that I am going to go back to mining.  But as an activity it was at the root of all I ended up doing in the game.

 

Leaving Rakapas and Arriving in Sakht

Given my lack of luck with convoy ops over the last few days, I decided to try and move my carrier forward on my own.

The route had been posted in the CapSwarm forum, along with some instructions for one awkward, no-station jump… which, as it happens, is the jump from Rakapas.

But first I had to go get some cynos lined up and in position to guide me along the path south.  I got on my second account, on my “main alt” character, the one with 110 million skill points, clone jumped him out of his implants alt, and sent him off to Jita to buy a few cyno ships.

I opted for simple, buying 4 Kestrels and fitting each with a Cynosural Field Generator I and loaded with 250 units of liquid ozone, enough to power the module for one cycle. (I obsessed and trained the relevant skill to V, just in case I needed to light a covert cyno.  More on jump drive operation here, if you are interested.)  I got my alt into one, contracted another to a second character on that account that I had trained up to be a cyno alt, and headed off to get myself situated.

Kestrel on the way out

I had at first thought about starting from Amarr or maybe Saranen, but as it turned out, Jita was by far the closest common point to the target systems.  Getting through to them, both in low sec, did not present any real problems.  The only hiccup I had was, after getting my main alt to his location, I logged on the secondary cyno jockey and was in such a hurry to fly out that, after I clone jumped him to Jita, I forgot to accept the Kestrel contract… or even get in a ship… and just started flying to the destination in a pod.  Yeah, slow down there bro.

After a couple of jumps I was suddenly all, “Oh yeah… the ship… right…” and went back to get it.  Once that was squared away, I was able to get out to the destination system and docked up without issue.

I logged him out, got back on my main alt, and got myself setup in the first destination system.  Since it lacked a station, the instructions in the forum said to cyno your capital in to the Astrahus citadel, let it refill your ship’s capacitor (citadels are handy like that, refilling and repairing like a full service gas station of old), and then warp off to the safe POS to wait out your jump timer.

Unfortunately for me, it was a Goonswarm Federation POS, which meant I wasn’t welcome inside unless I had the password.  So I was going to have to skip that step.  That meant facing the dire warnings about people coming to bump your capital off the citadel to get it out of tether range, at which point it could be blown up.

My solution to this was to jump out as soon as I possibly could, spending as little time as I could manage tethered.  That meant logging in the next cyno with the secondary alt, which would require logging off the primary alt, which I could not do until the cyno module cycle ended, something that takes a full ten minutes.

I decided to just light the first cyno and let module run to almost the end of its cycle before jumping in.  That meant I might lose the cyno ship before I could jump, but that seemed like the least cost failure scenario.  So I undocked him from the citadel and lit the beacon.

Earlier there had been a bunch of traffic through the system, but I seemed to have picked a quiet 10 minute window and my cyno ship went unmolested.  As the timer reached the last minute or so of its cycle, I undocked the carrier in Rakapas and made the jump, ending up hanging tethered on the citadel.

Archon tethered, cyno still burning

After the jump, I had a little over two minutes to wait before I could jump again.

The timer counting down

The cyno did not last that long, and I was able to swap characters and get in position well in advance of the jump reactivation timer.

As I sat there on the citadel, I noticed on the overview that the system had a gate to Rakapas.

Wait, I went how far?

I had waited all this time to jump what amounted to a single gate?  Well, sometimes that is how things work out.

At the station I faced two potential issues for the next jump.  One was where to place the cyno.  I do not do this enough to have a favored position for each station type, as some people do.  After watching other people, I try to get both a ways off the undock on both the horizontal and vertical axis so as to avoid bumping and such.  So I picked a spot a bit out and above the undock.

The tactical overlay helps

The other problem was that I was using a neutral alt in a system that was full of Imperium pilots.  While it was likely they would assume a neutral cyno was somebody’s alt, there was still a non-zero chance that somebody would shoot it just because.  So I got undocked, setup, and lit the cyno as quickly as I could, jumping the moment it was up.

Carrier on the undock

I docked up, op success.  I was now two jumps further down the line towards Delve.

I docked up my secondary alt when his cyno went down and traded him some replacement fuel that I was carrying along in my carrier, and sent him off to the next destination.  I had about two hours of jump fatigue and was planning to let that burn off before I jumped again, but I figured I ought to get the next jumps queued up.

The secondary alt got to the next station easily enough, at which point I logged my primary alt back in, flew him to catch up with the carrier to refuel, and then sent him off to the destination after the next one, so as to have two jumps lined up once again.

However, getting to that target meant flying through null sec space in the Syndicate region.  So it was not unexpected that, with the jump from low sec to null, I immediately hit a gate camp that had an interdictor.  It threw up a bubble when I landed in system and there wasn’t anything I could really do.  I decloaked and headed back to the gate on the off chance they were completely incompetent, but without an prop mod, that was a tiny gesture of defiance at best.  They blew up the ship and podded me, sending me back home.

Kestrel going down

But I had planned for that, expecting to lose these ships.  I had set my home in Jita for this, and was able to pick up another of the Kestrels I fitted out and started heading back towards the destination system again.  I stopped in a station before I got to the null sec transition again, thinking I would wait until later in the evening for that.

As it happened, while I was waiting, Asher pinged about a move op.  He was going to take people from Sakht, our current staging point, back to Saranen to pick up ships, at which point people up north could join the fleet and fly back down.

That seemed like an opportunity.  I couldn’t bring my main alt along to drive a ship as his jump clone timer still had many hours to go, but Wilhelm didn’t have a jump clone timer problem and was just sitting around in a station.  So I joined the op, watching it move around the map via a couple of wormhole connections, until it started to close in on Saranen, at which point I clone jumped to the area, picking the Oneiros I left parked in Ashitsu on Saturday.  As it happened, I did the jump just as they were passing through the system and was able to follow them back to Saranen.

Once there it was time for a break, during which I decided to fly my Cerberus down to Sakht.  Once everybody was back, we undocked and headed to the first wormhole, which was just a few jumps away in Eha.  We went through the wormhole, however it collapsed before everybody got through.  Those of us who made it were in Heimatar, in Minmatar space, where we had another dozen gates to take before we got to the next wormhole.

Those left behind in Eha were told where we were if they wanted to burn to us to try and catch up, but we moved on to the next hole.  However, the route to the next hole took us through what so many fear, high security space, and a 1.0 sec system in particular. (How can those rebel Minmatar have so many high security systems?)

Yes, we we’re in Heimatar!

Those with negative security status avoid high sec space with its NPC enforcement complications, and a full 1.0 system posed a threat to some along for the ride.  Never having had a negative security status rating during my time in New Eden, I never think about that as being an issue.  Even though I have bad standings with the Minmatar and Gallente factions (-4.72 and -5.74 respectively, the latter which should make me “shoot on sight”) after running so many Amarr/Caldari missions over the years, somewhere along the line I trained the social skill Diplomacy to level IV, which mitigates that sufficiently that I am merely loathed, but not actively shot at.

Some in the fleet hadn’t invested in that sort of stuff.  We were set to burn individually at best possible speed to get past the high sec terror and to the next wormhole.  Several people were locked up by the local faction police, and the occasional potshot was taken, but faction enforcers don’t warp scramble and in at least one case the webbing action of an NPC actually helped somebody get into warp faster.  Basically, comedy ensued, but nobody lost a ship.  We went to Hek and back mostly unscathed.

Once safely into low sec space again, we collected up again around the wormhole and jumped through.  Everybody got through safely and, it being a low sec to low sec connection, we were all in Aridia, just a few jumps from our destination.  We flew on, scattering the smart bombing battleships that were gate camping along the way, to arrive in our new home.

Get Sakht

So now I have at least been to Sakht this year.  I haven’t been this close to Delve since April of last year.

Of course, there is still work to do.  I have that carrier to move and a couple more doctrine ships to convoy down.  But at least I have made it through once… and I am no longer stuck in Rakapas.